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Sociolinguistics from the Periphery "presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users."

Book Information

Title:

Morphosyntactic Persistence in Spoken English

Subtitle:

A Corpus Study at the Intersection of Variationist Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Discourse Analysis

Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-usemorphosyntactic material that they have produced or heard before. In otherwords, linguistic patterns and tokens, once used, persist in discourse. Thepresent book is the first large-scale corpus analysis to explore thedeterminants of this persistence, drawing on regression analyses of avariety of functional, discourse-functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic,and external factors. The case studies investigated include the alternationbetween synthetic and analytic comparatives, between the s-genitive and theof-genitive, between gerundial and infinitival complemention, particleplacement, and future marker choice in a number of corpora samplingdifferent spoken registers and geographical varieties of English.

Providing a probabilistic framework for examining the ways in whichpersistence - among several other internal and external factors -influences speakers' linguistic choices, the book departs from mostwritings in the field in that it seeks to bridge several researchtraditions. While it is concerned, in a classically variationist spirit,with internal and external determinants of grammatical variation inEnglish, it also draws heavily on ideas and evidence developed bypsycholinguists and discourse analysts. In seeking to construct acomprehensive model of how speakers make linguistic choices, the studyultimately contributes to a theory of how spoken language works.

The book is of interest to graduate students and researchers invariationist sociolinguistics, probabilistic linguistics,psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.